The Once and Future Sneaker King

This piece on the history of the Air Jordan 1 was originally published as part of a three-part series to mark the release of The Last Dance. We’re resurfacing it ahead of Air, the new Ben Affleck and Matt Damon movie about Michael Jordan and Nike. To read Part 2 of the series on the evolution of the resale market, click here. For Part 3 on how Nike and Jordan Brand positioned the model for the future, click here.

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There’s a story behind virtually every pair of Air Jordan 1s. The classic Bred colorway represents a young player becoming a national sensation; they’re the big bang for Michael Jordan as a marketing icon and much of what’s come to be known as “sneaker culture.” The Shattered Backboards are modeled after the uniform he wore during a 1985 Italian exhibition game when he, well, shattered the backboard. The Barons are a reminder that the greatest basketball player on earth once took a year off to ride the bus in the minor leagues. The Lettermans are a tongue-in-cheek nod to the colors of the tracksuit a young Michael wore when he told the late-night host that he thought the Breds were ugly.

The story of the shoe’s first retro pack is one of abandonment.

In 1994, with a freshly retired Michael Jordan beginning a new career in the White Sox farm system, Nike did something it would do hundreds of times to much fanfare over the ensuing 25 years: re-release pairs of Air Jordans that had long been out of production. The first time the company did it, though, not many people seemed to care. To mark the 10th anniversary of its flagship shoe, Nike dropped pairs of the famous Bred and Chicago colorways, making them available to the public for the first time since they fell out of production in 1986.

Maybe the $80 price tag was too much for an old shoe when new ones didn’t cost much more at the time. Maybe it was the fact that Jordan was off playing baseball. Maybe it was the plethora of other sneaker options on the market, including MJ’s latest, the Air Jordan 10. The shoes sat on shelves. Retailers began slashing the price, until they reached $19.99. And then, as Kenneth Myers Jr. recalls, they hit stores not known for carrying coveted kicks.

“I wouldn’t even say they were outlet-bound,” says Myers Jr., a 25-year AJ1 aficionado who runs the Instagram account mr_unloved1s and traces his love of sneakers to those 1994 retros. “Sears, JCPenney, depending on where you lived at, was where you were going to find them.”

The story is unthinkable today, when the same retros that were once discounted to $19.99 sell for 100 times that amount and the AJ1s are more important than ever for Jordan Brand, which became its own subsidiary under the Nike umbrella in 1997. In November, the brand posted its first billion-dollar quarter, led by the sales of two shoes: its newest from the signature line, the Air Jordan 34, and the original Jordan 1, which saw at least 80 different versions released in 2019. (For perspective, the second-most-released retro in 2019, the Jordan 4, had 18 drops.) Demand for the classic silhouette is at an all-time high, surpassing even what it was when the shoe disrupted the sneaker industry 35 years ago. And with The Last Dance reigniting hype for basketball’s favorite son, demand may only increase.

“It’s very difficult to separate Michael’s world from the footwear world that we are a part of,” says Jordan Brand vice president Gentry Humphrey. “They’re really, really synonymous.”

The Jordan 1 is back at the head of the sneaker table, with a new edition announced seemingly daily, and versions ranging from general-release everyman kicks to high-end luxury items like the planned Dior AJ1 that are rumored to cost $2,000. But how exactly did a 35-year-old model become the most desired sneaker in the game? It turns out that much like with the renewed hype for Michael Jordan himself, it’s not just about recognizing greatness; it’s about finding new ways to tell the stories that build the myth.

The basketball rolls toward the man, who’s standing alone on a playground court. When it reaches him, he flips it up with his foot like a soccer ball, catches it and dribbles between his legs in one motion, and begins sprinting. The camera switches to slow motion as the sound of jet engines fades in. Within seconds, he’s in the air with his left arm outstretched, and he’s reached cruising altitude. In the next frame, we’re looking upward toward the sky as he slams the ball through the rim. “Who says man was not meant to fly?” he asks in a voice-over that plays with just clouds on the screen, as if speaking straight from the heavens.

This was how Nike introduced the story of Michael Jordan to the six cities in which it debuted his signature shoe in April 1985. On its own, the campaign wasn’t groundbreaking—Jordan wasn’t the first athlete or even basketball player to receive his own sneaker, and Nike had already developed a reputation for its ads—but considering the stakes involved and what would follow, it proved to be downright revolutionary.

In 1984, the company was in desperate need of a success story. Nike was ceding market ground to Reebok, which had exploded past its competitor as sales of trainers eclipsed running shoes. The situation was so grim that chairman and CEO Phil Knight opened his annual letter to shareholders with a dystopian outlook on Nike’s predicament: “Orwell was right: 1984 was a tough year.” There was one bright spot, however: That summer, Nike inked a rookie Michael Jordan to the most lucrative sneaker deal in history. It was a risk. The five-year, $2.5 million contract included an out for the company if the unproven player failed to hit certain performance markers—he had to win Rookie of the Year, become an All-Star, or average 20 points per game within his first three years—but it had the chance to pay off exponentially. Nike just needed a product worthy of that investment.

What lead designer Peter Moore came up with achieved that and then some. The first-ever Air Jordan is a stunning piece of footwear. It’s high-cut and made of premium leather, and unlike most basketball shoes of the era, its individual pieces allow for unique color blocking—something typically only running shoes provided at the time. The swoosh is displayed prominently, and toward the top sits the now-famous original Air Jordan logo, which Moore reportedly modeled after a set of plastic pilot wings. The shoes looked at once timeless and like they were sent from the future; The New York Times called them “spacebootlike” in 1986.

Before the Jordans, signature shoes had been made for NBA icons like Walt Frazier and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but never had one been designed with so much intent, says Elizabeth Semmelhack, the creative director of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto and author of two books on sneaker culture. MJ’s then agent, David Falk, and Nike vice president Rob Strasser had asked for a shoe that held appeal beyond the basketball court. Moore’s creation delivered. “Obviously it needed to perform well for Michael Jordan, but I think that it was designed with an eye towards fashion or aesthetics in a way a lot of other sneakers were not,” Semmelhack says.

Russ Bengtson, a former Complex editor who was 14 when the AJ1 debuted, remembers the hype distinctly. Michael was the most exciting player to enter the league in years—an instant All-Star with a gravity-defying, flashy style who was helping the league go global at a time when that wasn’t so easy to do. Bengtson just can’t recall whether he was aware of the player or the footwear first.

“Did I know who Michael Jordan was before Air Jordan, or was it the other way around? It’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing,” says Bengtson, who is still covering MJ on the After the Last Dance podcast.

Nike had expected to sell only 100,000 pairs of the $65 shoe in the first year. Instead, it shipped 1.5 million in the first six weeks. “Air Jordan was such an over-the-top thing, and if that had failed, you’re looking at an entirely different sneaker universe right now,” Bengtson says. But the gambit paid off: The AJ1s set a new standard for sneaker fashion and even found an alternative life as a skate shoe a few years after its debut. Knight opened his first shareholder letter after the Jordans had been out for a full year on an entirely different note: “The company has been in business 22 years, and 1986 was the best year we ever had.” The design and MJ’s on-court success had fed into the story and created an icon. It looked as if man was indeed meant to fly.

Nike has always had a knack for telling stories, and it found the perfect one with the most famous commercial for the first Air Jordan, which debuted not long after the “Meant to Fly” spot. It just took a bit of fiction to get there.

The broad strokes are familiar to anyone with passing interest in sneakers: In February 1985, a month and a half before the AJ1s would go on sale to the public, the NBA sent a letter to Nike that said MJ would be prohibited from wearing the new black and red shoes he had previously worn because they violated the league’s dress code, which at the time required footwear to be at least 51 percent white. Nike seized on the opportunity: Ahead of the shoe’s official release, the company debuted a national ad that hinted that the forbidden shoes perhaps offered a competitive advantage: “The NBA threw them out of the game,” the gravel-voiced announcer says as the camera pans down Michael’s long, sleek legs to reveal a pair of what’s commonly referred to as the Breds. “Fortunately, the NBA can’t stop you from wearing them.”

The legend says that the league levied a $5,000 fine against Michael each time he stepped onto the court in them, and that Nike was all too happy to pay it and drum up free publicity, even with the shoe also debuting in more traditional colorways. What could’ve been disastrous for a flagship product appeared to become an asset.

“It connected both this phenomenal player with these eye-catching shoes, and it spoke to ideas of American exceptionalism,” Semmelhack says. “Here’s a man who’s not only amazing because of all the hard work he does, but he also does it in his own way.”

But it turns out the story isn’t so cut and dry.

In 2012, Marvin Barias was browsing the forum on the sneaker-news website Sole Collector when he raised a question: Did anyone have pictures of Michael Jordan wearing the Banned AJ1s in an NBA game? Everyone had seen the famous photo of him in the 1985 slam dunk contest, when the NBA uniform rules didn’t apply and he sported the Breds and a gold chain. But no one could produce anything of him wearing them in a regular-season game.

“People were saying, ‘He got fined $5,000 a game every time he wore the shoe,’” says Barias, who runs the Instagram account mjo23dan and has written about the shoe and sneaker culture for Sole Collector. “So I thought it would be a simple thing to ask, like, ‘Well, is there any picture of him wearing the black and red shoe that people are supposedly saying is banned?’”

Barias turned up photos from 1985 of MJ wearing the famous Chicago colorway—which, unlike the Breds, contained enough white to meet the NBA’s uniform requirements—but the purportedly offending Breds were nowhere to be seen. Barias began digging through grainy newspaper images and YouTube clips, enlisted the help of other sneaker obsessives, and tracked all mentions of a young Michael’s footwear through interviews and other articles. But still, nothing—until he went back to the Bulls’ preseason games.

At first glance at the black and white photo, the shoes Jordan wore in his Madison Square Garden debut on October 18, 1984, could be mistaken for the infamous AJ1s: They’re black and red leather high-tops with the words “Air Jordan” emblazoned on the back. But closer inspection reveals something else: the tongue and toe box don’t belong to the AJ1, and the collar and heel lack the distinctiveness of Peter Moore’s design. These were the shoes the NBA referenced in its 41-word note to Nike. They were also an entirely different model: the Air Ships, a general-release sneaker that got a soft push in company ads. Michael even continued to wear them throughout his rookie campaign until the real Air Jordans were ready for the court in April ’85, albeit in league-compliant colors.

“You see the Air Jordan 1, and it’s a shoe that has gained notoriety over the years,” Barias says. “But the Air Ship was before the Jordan 1. That’s the shoe that Jordan was wearing.”

Barias, who detailed his findings in a 2016 Sole Collector article, started a Change.org petition the same year asking Nike to retro the Air Ship. But despite increasing buzz and the demand, the company didn’t acknowledge the Air Ship aside from one cryptic tweet in 2014. That finally changed in late 2019, when Jordan Brand announced the “New Beginnings” pack. The February 2020 release included two pairs of sneakers: a set of Air Jordan 1s and the red and white Air Ships. For Barias, pairing the two models was the best possible option for the Air Ship gaining public awareness. “If you just put it out into the marketplace by itself, people aren’t going to understand the story,” he says.

But even with the red and white version, there was still the matter of the true “banned” Jordan sneakers. Those also resurfaced this year, but in their original form, when sports agent Aaron Goodwin tweeted out pictures of an autographed set following episodes 3 and 4 of The Last Dance in late April.

“It’s as if the world was introduced to an unearthed holy grail for the very first time,” Barias says of that tweet.

In a vacuum, the Banned story is a triumph of marketing—taking one detail and successfully using it to build feverish hype for a new product and face of the company. But its place in the larger Jordan narrative makes it a myth of its own: a sneaker that was so revolutionary that the league had to shut it down, worn by a player who would revolutionize the game itself. It almost doesn’t matter today that the story appears to be apocryphal. Every legend needs an origin story. The best sometimes have a little bit of fiction mixed in.

There are more than 1,000 different Jordan 1s on GOAT, making it the sneaker marketplace app’s biggest shoe by volume. But there aren’t many before 2001. There’s the original 1985 lineup, including the black and red Breds, the Chicagos, a sample shoe in Syracuse colors, and a pair of Metallic Blues that are listed for $5,000. There’s the 1994 pack, which you could complete for as a little as $1,585, assuming you can fit into men’s sizes 8 and 8.5. And then for seven years, there’s nothing. Jason Mayden’s story helps to explain why that changed around the turn of the century.

Long before Mayden spent 13 years with the brand, where he worked his way up to senior global design director, he was a kid growing up in Chicago in the 1980s and early ’90s. To this day, he can vividly recall the first time he saw a pair of Jordans: He was in fourth grade when his classmate Tiana walked in wearing the Military Blue 4s. “I got in trouble, because the teacher thought I was staring at her biking shorts,” he says. “I was staring at her shoes, and I risked it all in that moment to get a glimpse.”

Mayden now had a life goal. A Batman fanatic obsessed with Lucius Fox’s inventions, he started sketching sneaker designs, with the hopes of one day doing so for Nike. He would eventually become Jordan Brand’s first design intern, and then get hired full time by the subsidiary in 2001, when he says it had roughly 70 employees. There, he learned firsthand from the brand’s namesake, a hands-on leader who routinely visited the campus to instill wisdom in the team, which was then “kind of like the little brother at Nike.”

“MJ sat us down and told us, ‘Hey, we can go for it. Who wants to be part of creating history? We can become a billion-dollar brand,’” Mayden says. “And we all believed in it.”

At the time, however, few outside the company could’ve predicted AJ1 retros would be a way of reaching that goal. Jordans had succeeded over the previous 15 years because of innovation; the original shoes were so successful the Jordan 2 was introduced in late 1986, followed by a new model every year beginning in 1988. Each new version brought new innovations: a Nike Air bubble in the 3, a reflective tongue in the 5, a mesh upper and patent-leather mudguard on the 11. And the price rose as the tech improved: By the time the Jordan 13 debuted in 1997, the shoe cost $150. The annual updates turned people into collectors, Semmelhack says, but the focus was firmly on obtaining what was new, not what was classic. “Once you make it part of a series, then you provide rationale, which is something that a lot of male consumption requires: ‘I have Air Jordan 1, 2, 3. I better make sure for my collection I have 4, 5, and 6.’”

This was also before retro culture had matured: The 1994 pack didn’t take off, and while Air Force 1s were popular enough to inspire a top-10 rap single, they had remained in production with few interruptions following their 1982 debut. Shoe companies weren’t often resurrecting old models that had only a brief run, and consumers didn’t seem to mind. But by the end of the ’90s, fashion was shifting. Hip-hop culture began embracing throwback jerseys, and suddenly, the classics were cool again. Mitchell and Ness, the vintage jersey manufacturer, saw its sales rise from $1.5 million in 1998 to $25 million in 2002. While Bengtson says the earlier Jordan retro pack may have planted the seed, the interest in throwback jerseys—and with them, throwback shoes—was a watershed moment for retros.

And as the demand for throwback jerseys rose, so did the interest in throwback sneakers. “In the mid-’90s, it was about having the super new pair of sneakers and keeping them clean and wearing them with everything,” Bengtson says. “Then jump ahead five years, and it’s about having all these different entire outfits that are all completely different components.”

Another shift around the turn of the century also changed things: the rise of the internet. Forums like NikeTalk and Sole Collector gave those who were collecting classics a place to discuss and trade them, and the continued growth of eBay opened up a new world of reselling. Sneaker fans who knew what to search for and how much they were willing to spend could find pretty much anything. “It opened the world’s closets and basements and attics to everybody,” Bengtson says. “It let you dig through someone else’s stuff, as if every house in your neighborhood was having a garage sale at the same time.”

Jordan Brand slowly began to seize on the moment, rolling out first a few Jordan 4s in 1999, then some 5s, 6s, and 11s in 2000. In 2001, Jordan finally re-released pairs of AJ1s—seven in total, including Breds and Black Royals and a few Japanese exclusives. Production didn’t exactly boom at first—there was one AJ1 in 2002, two in 2003, and none in 2004 or 2005—but by the end of the decade, releases like the Strap Bred showed there was still demand for the classic silhouette. The hype steadily increased, and the market exploded with the releases of the Fragment Design collab in late 2014 and the Shattered Backboards and remastered Chicagos the next year. More recent shoes like the popular Union Los Angeles collaboration have only pushed the AJ1 to a new level.

“There are a lot of people that don’t know about the AJ1 from before 2015,” says Myers, a.k.a. Mr. Unloved 1s. “There are a lot of people that don’t know anything before the Unions.”

The throwback moment of the early 2000s allowed Jordan Brand to revisit classic designs and help the relatively new Nike branch grow. However, the decision to lean into them may have also been one of necessity: Mayden says that the brand’s design team was short-staffed at the time and couldn’t meet the market demand for new shoes. “It became a good business strategy to relieve the pressure off the designers from having to create every single thing new,” he says. “It was a beautiful moment to be at the beginning of what now is just the norm.”

Focus on Sport via Getty Images

What is it about the Air Jordan 1 that still captivates the imagination? Neither the “Banned” nor “Meant to Fly” ads were the most successful Jordan campaigns—that distinction belongs to the Jordan 3 Mars Blackmon “It’s Gotta Be the Shoes” commercials with Spike Lee. The 1s weren’t Michael’s favorites—those are the 11s, which he famously wore in Space Jam. They’re certainly not the best to play basketball in—the thin rubber sole is no match for newer models like XX8, which boasts a neoprene shroud and carbon-fiber support. And the 1s weren’t the sneakers Michael rocked when he became a champion for the first time—his legend was truly cemented with black and red 6s on his feet.

Part of the reason the AJ1 is still so beloved is the look. Peter Moore’s finest sneaker features a distinct yet classic design that pops without being too showy, and it was the only signature Jordan until the XXXI to contain a swoosh. It’s also the most utilitarian Air Jordan: “You can play basketball in it, you can skate in it, you can wear it to a fashion show—I mean, you can literally wear it anywhere,” says Houston Rockets forward P.J. Tucker, whose first basketball shoes were the AJ1s his mother bought him as he was growing up in North Carolina.

“I saw a lady the other day, she was like 60 or 70 years old, and she had a pair of Jordan 1s on,” Tucker says. “It was like somebody’s grandma, it’s unbelievable.”

The first Air Jordans have also become something of a status symbol: Off-White CEO Virgil Abloh kicked off his Nike collaboration in 2017 with a pair of deconstructed Chicago 1s. Travis Scott reimagined the classic silhouette with his Cactus Jacks. Kylie Jenner has a pair of the as-yet-unreleased Diors. The shoes are not only king of the sneaker world, they also occupy a special place among influencers and fashionistas.

“The guy who’s bagging your groceries and Jay-Z are wearing the same shoe,” says Lena Waithe, the writer and actor. “Michael Jordan means just as much to the person bagging the groceries as he does to Jay-Z.”

Letting influencers and designers work with the AJ1 is a key part of Jordan’s success with this model, says Humphrey, the brand vice president. Someone like Abloh, who grew up outside Chicago, can tell his story through the Off-Whites in a way that he couldn’t with another shoe. Something like Scott’s AJ1 reimagining puts his artistic fingerprint on the classic silhouette, making him an iconoclast like MJ himself when the “Banned” commercial debuted.

“We’re able to really kind of use it as a canvas, to work with various people to help them paint that picture with this product,” Humphrey says.

But the brand also has a secret weapon: the legend of MJ himself, and the way the AJ1s can tell it. The Shattered Backboard in 2015, for example, resurfaced a long-forgotten piece of the myth of MJ, while the 2009 DMP “Bulls Celtics” pack commemorates an upstart MJ’s breakout performance against the Celtics in the 1986 playoffs. Something like the Air Ship retro isn’t just a smart business decision—it’s a nod to MJ’s roots, an addition to the canon. The AJ1, more than any other version of the shoe, is the perfect canvas for storytelling.

Humphrey says that the brand approaches many AJ1 releases in a way similar to how Picasso approached his work. The individual elements may seem confusing at first—eyes that seem to be looking in different directions, or maybe a nontraditional swoosh—but the concept of the composition comes together through the backstory. The eyes in the painting represent the complexity of life. The multihued swoosh on the “A Star Is Born” AJ1 represents Michael slashing through Bucks defenders on his first Sports Illustrated cover.

“We’ll tell stories, we’ll come up with ideas and concepts, then as we start to veneer the project itself, we hope that consumers can start to appreciate all the things that we put into it,” Humphrey says.

But MJ’s stories are just one part of the connection. Everybody seems to have a different tale of how they came to the AJ1. For Tucker, who grew up in the ’80s just miles from where Jordan became a legend at the University of North Carolina, they represented the beginning of his love for basketball. He still owns his first AJ1s to this day. “That’s like part of why I’m an NBA player, why I love sneakers, why I do damn near everything I do,” Tucker says. For Bengtson, they represent his youth, when his parents wouldn’t pay the sticker price for a pair of Jordans. They instead got him a pair of $35 Nikes at Marshalls—ironically, the Air Ships, which were decades away from being revealed as the holiest of grails. Bengtson eventually got his first pair of Jordan 1s at a Goodwill in the early ’90s: “They were two sizes too big for me and pretty beat up, and I bought them anyway because I just figured there was no chance of me getting a pair of Jordan 1s again,” he says.

For Jason Mayden, his AJ1 story is more personal: He was a self-described “hospital kid” who wrestled with septicemia, a potentially fatal bacterial infection that sends toxins into the bloodstream. He survived and grew up to fulfill his life’s dream, designing shoes for Michael Jordan’s brand. He worked on many retros during the 2000s, but one holds a special place for him: a pair of Jordan 1s designed in collaboration with a young kidney-transplant survivor through Nike’s program to benefit Doernbecher Children’s Hospital.

“It was amazing being able to take some of the most iconic shoes but then to turn them into products that encouraged children who were in the hospital, who went through things that I had went through,” he says. “It was full circle.”

Waithe says her story is one of visibility: Growing up in Chicago during MJ’s Bulls playing days, putting on the shoes gave her a sense of pride; they made her feel like a superhero when she rocked them to school. To her, Michael’s greatness was almost transferable.

“You feel seen wearing this pair of shoes because there’s no one more visible than the person whose name that the shoe bears,” says Waithe, who recently created the sneaker-culture show You Ain’t Got These for Quibi. “You don’t get more visible than him. You don’t get more magical than him. You don’t get more superhuman than him.”

Waithe’s first pair of Jordans weren’t the 1s—they were the gray and white 12s. But to her, the first Jordans still represent the origin story: for Michael, for her love of sneakers, for modern sneaker culture itself. She even has the AJ1 silhouette tattooed on her arm. The impact of a story doesn’t get much more visible than that.